Research Interests

Professor Akella’s research is the design and implementation of high performance and low power computing systems. Over the years he has worked in systems that encompass a variety of application domains such as multimedia, networking, error-correcting codes, computational biology, and scientific computing.

He is currently working on the following research projects.

1. Interconnects between processors on and off-chip and processors and memory is the critical bottleneck in terms of power consumption and performance in computing systems. We are exploring the use of novel technologies such as nanoscale photonics and architectural techniques to design interconnects that can scale to exascale systems i.e. systems with million’s of processors.
2. Simulation is widely used to evaluate the performance of computing systems especially during the design phase. It is inherently a trade-off between accuracy and simulation time. Reconfigurable FPGAs are particularly useful in accelerating simulation speed without compromising accuracy. We are building FPGA-based simulation engines for computing systems that can yield new insights into on and off-chip network and memory traffic.
3. Smartphones are the personal computing devices of the future. We are developing tools and techniques to optimize software to prolong the battery-life on these new category of embedded systems.